Paper short abstract:

Inhotim holds one of the leading collections of contemporary art in Brazil and is exemplary of the proliferation of institutions outside the euro-american axis with global relevance. However, even if the core of the collection is Brazilian, it reproduces a global hierarchy of value.

Paper long abstract:

Inhotim holds one of the leading collections of contemporary art in Brazil and is considered the largest open-air museum in Latin America. It exhibits large-scale sculptures and installations that were purchased or commissioned from renowned national and international artists, many of them in individual pavilions built specifically to house them. Located in the mining town of Brumadinho, it is far from the other main art centres of the country.

In this presentation, I'd like to examine the contemporary art collection on permanent display in Inhotim in order to explore how the museum acquired pertinence to the global art world (Belting, 2009). I argue that Inhotim is exemplary of the proliferation of institutions outside the euro-american axis with global relevance, however, reproducing a global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2004), in the sense that the Brazilians highlights of the collections are artists that made their way into the museum by their international validation. By putting Brazilian and international acclaimed artists side by side, Inhotim's collection contributes to revising some aspects of the global modernist canon of art history predicated on European models. Nonetheless, it continues to reinforce the importance of validation of euro-american institutions to make such revisionist claims